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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25502239">faux</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial'>perennial</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fairy Tales &amp; Related Fandoms, Swan Lake &amp; Related Fandoms, Лебединое озеро - Чайковский | Swan Lake - Tchaikovsky</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Deception, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Mistaken Identity, Royalty, Villain/Hero, ambiguous ending, happy marrieds</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:35:18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,778</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25502239</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Wait,” Odile told her father, laying an arresting hand on his arm. He was about to shout his triumph over the fool of a man who thought he could outwit a sorcerer. “I want to keep him.”<br/>He looked down at her with an expression of blended amusement and jealousy. “I thought you were heartless,” he said. “It seems you take after your mother after all.”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Odile/Prints Siegfried | Prince Siegfried (Lebedínoye Ózero | Swan Lake)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>43</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>faux</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinuspinea/gifts">pinuspinea</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>many thanks to pinuspinea for letting me borrow the idea of this family structure!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sometimes she considers telling him the truth. The impulse will flood through her as she lays in bed, watching dawn cascade over the coverlet and bathe the soft rise and fall of his chest in rose gold, or when his throat contracts with laughter at a joke someone has told, or when she lays gasping in that same bed and he holds her with fingers that tremble.</p><p>She would tell him if she were sure of him. Of course she would. What risk would there be? Coward, she calls herself. He tells her he loves her in every manner and variation it can be expressed, and still she shies away from the final step. It will secure bliss eternal – or destroy the golden happiness she now possesses, that is <em>enough</em>, that she could live on for a lifetime. Greedy, she calls herself. Why stir calm waters? Her cup is full; must she have it brimming?</p><p>She has everything else. She has her own face; she has her name. <em>Odile</em>, the first of many lies. She had been quick to tell him that Odette was a pet name, and that she preferred to forget any links to the days before she knew him. He’d merely lifted an eyebrow and said, “It’s a good thing I didn’t swear on your name.” <em>This woman</em> – so he’d called her the night he made the vow of eternal love that he believes broke the spell her mother lives under in a hidden lake not far away.</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <em>“Wait,” she told her father, laying an arresting hand on his arm. He was about to shout his triumph over the fool of a man who thought he could outwit a sorcerer. “I want to keep him.”</em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>He looked down at her with an expression of blended amusement and jealousy. “I thought you were heartless,” he said. “It seems you take after your mother after all.”</em>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>Shifting her face took a full year, done so imperceptibly that no one noticed. With care and patience she had altered her wedding and coronation portraits as well. All she must maintain is the color of her hair, destined to remain forever flaxen instead of raven, though she has let it darken to honey. “You’re no longer in the sun all day,” he’d noted. She hadn’t even had to provide an excuse.</p><p>Those were easy transformations. To think back on that first season makes her laugh and shudder simultaneously. At the very beginning, before she understood what she had chosen, it seemed simple: a new life. She stepped into his golden, glittering world and was so swept away by its beauty, so gloriously different from everything she knew, that she had not thought it would be possible to want what she left behind.</p><p>She had never felt grief before. She had thought she was dying. Eventually she became so weak she could hardly stand, and he was as pale as she. A herd of physicians puzzled over her case until she was diagnosed by a kind-eyed country doctor who had grown up in a forester’s cottage.</p><p>It did not seem possible that endless miles of stone and metal could kill her. Bridges over dirty rivers, shrubs severely trimmed as though being punished—seemingly normal things, but to Odile as good as inhaling poison. It makes sense, now that that she knows it: that her cool green dells and laketop breezes are as necessary to her soul as food to her body, that the lake’s pebbled shores and silvery grasses full of fireflies and the dark twilight beneath the pines are as much a part of her as her hot red blood.</p><p>They fled the city for the cloud-caught mountains - not her lake, but a good enough antidote. When they returned a month later she found a forest waiting for her. Siegfried had ordered an entire wing of the palace demolished and built a massive atrium in its place. It is crammed with full-grown trees—sure sorcery—that she can almost believe are the same oaks and pines she took her first steps beneath. A stream that ends in a clear pond, and mossy fallen logs and mushroom rings, snails and butterflies and birds, blackberry thickets and violet vales. It is spanned by a high glass roof that she can open or close to admit the weather or not.</p><p>She had spent a week sleeping under trees, eating nothing but honey and berries, and bathing in the rain. When he eventually came looking for her, he had found her tucked away in a treetop wearing nothing but a tunic and feeding a squirrel to a nestful of eagle chicks.</p><p>“I wasn’t born to be a queen,” she told him mournfully.</p><p>“I love your wildness,” he replied.</p><p>It took her a year to adjust to being his queen, and even with his patient guidance she would never have begun to master it if not for a lifetime watching her mother hold court over the lake. Sometimes Odile loses herself in her mock forest. Other times she performs her duties so perfectly that she briefly forgets she is a fraud.</p><p>-</p><p>She loves him, <em>oh</em>, she <em>does</em>, it fills her lungs and makes her blood ache. She loves his head on her lap as he reads treatises and letters, the heavy warmth of the hand that never leaves her waist as he speaks with foreign dignitaries before state suppers, the lost look in his eyes when he cannot be in contact with her, the way he gravitates toward her as though she is his oxygen. She loves that he hums songs to her as he reads, she loves her fingers threaded through his sun-warmed auburn curls, she loves the lingering tartness on his mouth when he has been eating lemons. She loves watching his eyes at the ballet, she loves the lithe movements of his limbs when he walks naked through their bedroom, loves the shape of her name in his mouth. She loves that he discards his regalia to play kickball with the stable boys when no one is watching, that he refused to leave the stall of his favorite mare, whom he had bottle-fed as a sickly foal, for two days and nights while she struggled to give birth, loves the ceaseless patience with which he listens to every supplicant on beseeching days. The open heart and hand and care with which he resolves every case. The fact that he has chosen patient, wise advisors. That from childhood he tasked himself with learning the law of his land so that he might always know how it serves and fails his people. She loves the way he smiles at her, that smile that has only ever been for her, one of a knowing, familiar, endeared love, that made its first appearance well into the first year of their marriage; she hoards its every appearance like a dragon, this jewel that exists only for her.</p><p>Sometimes it flashes in his eyes - the wild yearning he must suppress. He looks at her and she can see how her own feral soul is a release for him, the same way he is her landing spot when the sky is too vast. Her internal crescendo subsides into peace at the sight of him. His mere presence is steady ground.</p><p>She cannot give him up. She cannot. <em>I will not</em>.</p><p>-</p><p>The first few weeks were full of questions. They are rare now, but still arrive with the moonlight to break the dark peace of their bedroom.</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <em>Did it hurt when you transformed?</em><br/>
<em>What was it like, flying? Do you miss it?</em><br/>
<em>Do you think he’s dead?</em>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>Her father visits the palace often. Her mother is dead, or so Siegfried believes. Of all Odile’s lies it is so close to the truth that she barely remembers it isn’t. Odette is more swan than human these days.</p><p>“Your mother misses you,” her father told her when she couldn’t bring herself to visit the lake for months after her wedding—the words a chastisement, the tone a warning. So Odile returned home, carefully timing her visit for a busy beseeching day and offhandedly telling her distracted husband that her father had asked her for a visit. Almost the truth.</p><p>Her father spent the afternoon giving her lessons—“Getting rusty,” he said, though they both knew she wasn’t—and at sunset she went to the shore where she had met her mother every evening of her life until Siegfried appeared.</p><p>The flock of swans flew in formation, their great white wings spreading wide as they banked gracefully on the water. A brief glow lit the shore.</p><p>Her mother looked at her and smiled her beautiful moonbeam smile, and Odile burst into tears.</p><p>“How can you forgive me?” she sobbed.</p><p>“I love you more than my life,” her mother said – just that, no more, and they had never spoken of it again.</p><p>But surely Odette’s love, deep though it may be, cannot wholly forget. There must be a corner of her heart that will not forgive. How can she? The daughter she gave life to has stolen her rightful one.</p><p>Odile loves her mother with the purest love she possesses. In all the world, Odette is the sole recipient of her untainted love.</p><p>And yet, despite the strength of the guilt that will be her lifelong burden, she is not sorry enough to give back to her mother the life she stole from her, not sorry enough to leave him, not sorry enough to confess.</p><p>“I’m like my father, I’m like my father,” she sobs into Siegfried’s chest, crying so hard her ribs might break.</p><p>He is bewildered, tries to comfort her. “What? What do you mean? Oh, love—”</p><p>With every endearment she cries even harder, until he can do nothing but close his mouth and hold her.</p><p>-</p><p>She imagines telling him. No, she imagines his reactions.</p><p>He has known all along and was waiting for her to come to him with the truth.</p><p>He figured it out at some point in time—small suspicions coalescing into certainty that had then been dismissed. Why has she worried so? She is his heart.</p><p>He knew the night of the ball, before they even spoke, and he still chose her.</p><p><em>If any such thing were true he would have confessed long before now</em>, whispers a voice in her mind. It sounds vaguely like her father.</p><p><em>He loves me. He will choose me. He will understand.</em> As if it isn’t the worst betrayal imaginable, stealing the man her mother loved, stealing the love of her mother’s lover. As if she doesn’t know that he is so good that by virtue of his nature he will instinctively thrust her away—that her beauty will appear as putrefaction to him—that the love he breathes today will taste like rot in his mouth.</p><p>-</p><p><em>Why?</em> Her mother never asks it, in word or look.</p><p>It was his happiness, Odile wants to scream it, tear trees apart with it, jolt her mother awake with it. The bright pure joy of life that shone from his eyes, more than I ever knew could exist in a person.</p><p>She wonders what Odette saw when she looked into his eyes. The sky?</p><p>-</p><p>A flutter in her abdomen. A new light to her smile. He trails his fingertips across the bare skin of her gently swelling belly and hopes for twins.</p><p>“Greedy,” she laughs. “Let’s get the hang of it first.”</p><p>“A boy and a girl,” he says. “I can’t decide which I want more, so let’s have both. Then they’ll never be alone, either. They’ll always have each other.”</p><p>She kisses him, the lonely boy who grew up in a lonely castle. “Always.”</p><p>-</p><p>She is older than her mother now. Odette, trapped in time for as long as she refuses to marry her captor, will never age beyond twenty-two. Still, there is a timelessness to her eyes that speaks of a lifetime’s worth of despair and even more patience. Someday, Odile thinks, her silent mother will simply fade away into a moonbeam.</p><p>It has always been a question too delicate to broach – the circumstances in which they conceived a daughter. The sorcerer’s love is definable only to himself; it is an ardor selfish enough to imprison the woman he loves for eternity but too devoted to force himself into her body. The act did not break the curse, so Odette must have chosen it and yet not chosen him.</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <em>Chosen you.</em>
  </p>
</blockquote><p><em>Is it worth it?</em> She did ask that, once. <em>He owns you either way.</em> Her mother had merely looked at the lake with eyes that smiled.</p><p>The moon is small and high in the sky. Odile lays beside the lake with her head in her mother’s lap. Odette strokes her raven hair with thin, pale fingers.</p><p>Stars fade and sharp silhouettes of trees appear. The band of rust on the horizon splays out into rays of yellow and pink. A familiar glow of white, and the swan glides across the silvery mirror of the lake. Water beads her feathers like gemstones.</p><p>“I will love you all my life long,” Odile whispers, but her mother remains a swan.</p><p>-</p><p>She is hardly the first woman who has kept a lifelong secret. She ought to be grateful hers is so easy to conceal.</p><p>With time, enough truth will merge into the lies to fade the lines. As the maiden has merged into the swan, the intended queen will be lost in the one crowned.</p><p>And perhaps – perhaps – it will not drown them.</p><p>-</p><p>Her father insists that the swan maidens are on hand at the castle to help during the birth. She has never seen her father in the state of anxiety that seems to have become his sole personality trait since she fell pregnant, so she humors him. “The women who have always assisted my family,” she explains to Siegfried, who is long inured to her father’s odd requests.</p><p>Her father alters the spell to keep them human for the duration of their stay, but the lake that is their prison has soaked into them and become their life source, and they instinctively spend all their time near the pond in her castle forest. None of them are Odette and yet somehow all of them are; after decades together they share expressions and mannerisms. They speak as rarely as their queen, but when they do every word echoes with her voice. Odile begins to suffocate.</p><p>“I need—” she tells Siegfried.</p><p>“Yes?”</p><p>She shakes her head.</p><p>“Perhaps a visit to your father.”</p><p>She shakes her head more energetically.</p><p>He hesitates before meeting her eyes.</p><p>-</p><p>The forest forms a dense roof far over their heads. Cardinals and jays jump from branch to branch, calling to their neighbors. Odile silently greets the silver-barked pines and blue ferns.</p><p>They walk hand in hand over the soft grass that forms paths through the fallen red needles. She has never been here with him, though he has been here with her. They stay far from the lake—him out of consideration for her history there, her from utter dread of an encounter with her mother—but she can feel its presence.</p><p>It wants her close. It sends breezes that carry its familiar damp scent.</p><p>Pain lances through her abdomen.</p><p>“We might be getting close to where I shot you,” he says, studying the bluff face. “I wonder what happened to the arrow.”</p><p>She lifts a face whiter than salt to him. Her hands clutch her rounded belly—a frequent gesture over the last eight months, but this time it indicates agony.</p><p>Alarm enters his eyes. “Not yet. Not here!”</p><p>She clenches her teeth and groans, resisting her body’s natural pull. They walk as far as they can before she can go no further. He carries her until she cries to be set down.</p><p>Steady gray eyes see her through the birth. The pain is lightning and daggers and fire. At the end of it a great rush of magic surges out of her as she expels the obstruction within her pelvis. Utterly exhausted and numb with pain, she collapses backward, panting. After a moment she laughs to hear a tiny cry from a third set of lungs.</p><p>Through her open knees she can see her husband. His neck is bent so that she cannot view his face. He is very still.</p><p>Fear turns her cold. “Is it alright?”</p><p>He doesn’t answer. She lifts her head to see.</p><p>He holds their daughter—a perfect baby girl with raven hair.</p><p>Like an arm bent the wrong way that finally snaps, Odile gasps with relief.</p>
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